Naomi Dillon
Social Media
Campaign
School board candidates are increasingly using social media tools like
Facebook and Twitter to get their message out to the public
our years ago, Barack Obama delivered a
stunning victory at the presidential polls,
in no small part because of his campaign’s ability to harness the power of
social media to build grass roots support.
And so it was for Steve Knagg, who
threw his hat into the school board race
earlier this year after a short-lived retirement and longtime
career with the Garland Unified School District in suburban
Dallas.
A seasoned communications professional, Knagg had been
instrumental to the district’s unblemished record of successful
bond referendums. But he soon discovered the world had dramatically changed in the five years since he retired.
“It seems to me, the way people want to get their information these days is on a little screen in their hand,” Knagg notes.
Mobile technology and social media have arguably been the
21st century’s most disruptive innovations. According to the
Pew Internet & American Life Project, two-thirds of
Americans who go online do so to visit social networking sites.
And many of them do so from smart phones, which about half
of all Americans own.
Such ubiquity has changed the way people interact, connect, and exchange information. It’s even altered the political
process. Indeed, another Pew survey found more than onequarter of respondents citing social networking sites as an
important source for political news, debate, and rallying.
Though he’d used sites like Facebook and Twitter in his
personal life, Knagg didn’t transfer those tools into his election
bid until he saw his opponent, a 19-year-old college sophomore, gain instant visibility after launching a website and
employing social media.
“I thought ‘OK, I’ve got to do that, too,’” Knagg says. But
while he may have initially followed his young rival into social
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media territory, Knagg soon blazed the trail, deftly using the
tools to connect with constituents in ways he never could have
imagined.
“It got people involved in my campaign on an emotional
level,” Knagg says. “It really surprised me.”
Social media and serious pursuits
Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr have long
been places for people to catch up with old friends, make new
ones, and share information and insight. That those capabilities are now being used for more serious endeavors like finding a job, attracting a business partner, or amassing a political
base makes perfect sense, says Maurene Grey, a fellow at the
Society for New Communications Research.
Like email or Internet chat rooms, social media is just
another tool that allows people to interact with one another,
says Grey, who has studied the phenomenon of human and
interpersonal communication for more than a quarter century.
What sets social media apart and makes it such an asset for
those running an election campaign is its interactive and viral
nature.
When you use this method in a campaign, your statements
and opinions go beyond one-to-one communications, going
many directions and taking different paths, Grey says. “It’s like
that old game of telephone, except on steroids.”
It’s an apt analogy, as modern technology has had a multiplier effect on communication—for better and for worse. But
first, the better.
As an IT director at North Carolina’s Elon University, staying abreast of the latest technologies is part of Tony Rose’s job
description. But as the son of a teacher and school bus driver,
public education was also part of his DNA. So, when a board
member from his alma mater, the Alamance-Burlington School
District, announced that he would not be seeking reelection in
Copyright 2012 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved. This article may be printed out and
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November 2010, Rose began strategizing.
“I filed in February and my goal was to be the most wellknown newcomer by Labor Day,” he says. “The decision to use
social media was almost as simple as breathing.”
Rose had a website, a Twitter account, and a Facebook
page up and running before announcing his candidacy.
“In the game of politics, it’s all about name recognition,”
says Rose. “You can have all the good ideas you want, but if no
one knows who you are, you won’t get elected.”
Through tweets and retweets, friending friends of friends,
and constant updates, Rose’s social media strategy clearly paid
off for his campaign. He not only beat a better-known challenger for the school board seat, but came within 1,000 votes
of the top vote-getter, a prominent local pediatrician.
“If anything, that was a testament to the influence of social
media,” Rose says.
Name recognition wasn’t Knagg’s problem. After all, he’d
spent three decades working in the communications department at Garland Unified, interacting with the public on a regular basis.
The challenge for Knagg was one that many school board
candidates face: getting the electorate engaged enough to participate and vote. “School board races around here are a pretty boring thing,” he says, pointing to the 3,600 votes cast in the
last school election in a district of 250,000 residents.
In his first bid for office, Knagg did all the usual stuff, hosting a candidate reception, taking part in voter forums, and dispatching direct mail pieces. But the addition of social networking sites, along with the media attention Knagg’s matchup generated, took it to a new level.
“There were two spots open on the board, but what helped
my campaign was that mine was interesting. Mine was news,”
he says. He used the heightened television and newspaper coverage to his advantage. “If there was something that mentioned
my race, I’d blow that up and get it out there and then people
would link to that and someone else would link to that.”
In the end, though, it was a personal posting, a picture of
Knagg’s 2-year-old grandson sitting beneath one of his campaign signs that provided him the most traction.
“I put that on my Facebook page, and then someone else
posted a picture with their grandchild under my sign. And
then, it was like, ‘Hey everybody post a picture of your grandkids,’ and then people were saying, ‘Hey, I don’t have a sign. I
need a sign,’” Knagg says. “It was just amazing and all free. It
was a positive experience.”
But campaigning with social media isn’t always so positive.
Out of control
In the social media world, messages can take myriad and
unpredictable paths that the sender doesn’t always have control over, Grey says. “Like that game of telephone, by the time
the message comes back around, it might have changed, been
taken out of context, and used in a way it was never intended.”
Bob Hughes knows this firsthand. A former school board
member with the Lake Washington School District and now a
board member with the Washington State Board of Education,
Hughes was one of the earliest to adopt technology into his
campaign. He built a website for his campaign in the 1980s
after business travel had him out on the road and unable to
campaign the traditional way.
A retired Boeing executive and computer geek, Hughes
taught himself HTML code over one weekend and turned a
random website by an education professor into his own by
changing the text and some of the colors.
“I basically stole it,” says Hughes, who in a strange twist of
fate ran across that same professor at a conference years later.
“I saw his name in the program and I thought: I’ve got to meet
this guy and tell him what I did.” The professor only laughed
after Hughes confessed. It turns out that he’d done the same
thing.
Of course, that was decades ago, when the World Wide Web
was still in its infancy and the functionalities inherent in Web
2.0 were but a dream. Today’s tools are a powerful means of
networking and sharing information. Sometimes, however, the
viral nature of social media can backfire, as it did one holiday
season when Hughes was board president at Lake Washington.
One of the high schools had agreed to let a local theater
company use its auditorium for a production of “The
Christmas Carol.” Unfortunately, the Christmas spirit sank
once the company and the principal got into a dispute over
whether the school’s students should pay to see a preview. The
angry administrator threatened to pull the plug.
“So, the company manager goes to the press and you know
what the headline was? ‘Tiny Tim thrown out of school for
Christmas,’” says Hughes, who can laugh about it now. Back
then, the story got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, Focus on the
Family, and the international media.
“I got calls and emails from Japan, London, all over the
world,” Hughes says. “None of them were from local media.”
The fluid nature of social media makes for a degree of
uncertainty, Grey says, but that doesn’t mean users should
take an “anything-goes” approach.
“We’re still in a ‘cool kid’ phase with social media. Many
haven’t thought through the implications of what this all
means,” Grey says.
Viruses, spam, malware, privacy—there’s a lot to consider
when integrating social networking sites into a campaign’s
arsenal. Ultimately, however, it comes down to having something meaningful to share.
“The delivery is important, but the content is becoming a
much more significant component of the message,” Grey says.
“Having something relevant to say is really key in the social
media world because it can give you a lot of exposure.” ■
Naomi Dillon (ndillon@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American
School Board Journal.
Copyright 2012 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved. This article may be printed out and
photocopied for individual or noncommercial educational use (50 copy limit), but may not be electronically
re-created, stored, or distributed; or otherwise modified, reproduced, transmitted, republished, displayed or
distributed. By granting this limited license, NSBA does not waive any of the rights or remedies otherwise
available at law or in equity. By granting permission to use of our materials, NSBA does not intend to
endorse any company or its products and services.
American School Board Journal ■ www.asbj.com ■ November 2012 13